The Opera browser has been a favorite of mine ever since the days when it was available by subscription only. It was buried in the noise level generated by the revitalized interest Microsoft put into Internet Explorer, but Opera and it's unique features always appealed to my eccentric technology tastes. For one it was a strict adherent to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of standards to which Microsoft paid lip service but ignored for the most part. That was fine if you were a dedicated Microsoft fan, but those of us who were thinking outside the box had no kind words for IE and the way it treated web page rendering.

I've stuck with Opera all these years, even thought I confess it has not been my default browser for a long time now. I have gone to it as the ultimate test for web page rendering and still maintain a nostalgic love for it's own eccentricities. But, how the world has changed since that love at first sight. Internet Explorer, version 10, is well poised to take back it's lead in the browser world, and Opera ... well, Opera was purchased by the gang of thugs over at Facebook. They swore to let it live a life of it's own, but what company would be so fatally flawed as to bite the hand that feeds it? I can't help thinking that Facebook and it's myriad of user unfriendly security issues has made a fatal imprint on the latest Opera release, version 15. It's not what it used to be, and like Microsoft with it's blundering into Windows 8, Opera will be doing some backtracking if it intends to keep its user base at a profitable level.

Apparently search engines are all equal at the core. The web engine called WebKit runs them all, or did in the past several years. Opera decided the Blink search engine model is the way to go these days, and has abandoned some of the critical user needs from a browser in it's efforts. Bookmarks as we know them do not exist in the latest offering of Opera. They have some very convoluted ways of managing what used to be bookmarks, but the learning curve is complex and burdensome. It's not the kind of thing you want to spend hours pouring over to research the equally convoluted help system for answers. I will say that Opera presents itself as a very clean an neat browser well suited for mobile devices. Be that as it may, there STILL is no bookmark management provided in the native code.

For now I will drop Opera off the top of my recommended browser list. It's worth a try when you have a lot of time to research obscure technical facts (are you listening, Glenn?), but for the average person who just wants a web page to be called from their list of bookmarked pages, go elsewhere.

Here is how I see the list of preferred browsers today. None are perfect for my needs, but this is the order in which I prefer to use them.

I still like CELLO the best of them all. In its day of course!Today I use Chromium most often, followed by Google Chrome and then Firefox.I'm on Google Chrome right now, but if I check Links, I do so through Firefox, rather than a tab or new Chrome window.If I decide to open a link from a link. The third link will be opened in Iceweasel.I do it this way to keep my History Lists cleaner.In the event I find a website I want to bookmark, I will reopen the site in either Firefox or Chrome, depending upon how I want to access the History file later. Chrome has a LOUSY history file. Firefox's history file is great for collecting links for reuse, fast and simple. Or they used to be, don't know if they still are, because I've not had to use that feature in well over a year now. Put to put it bluntly. Google Chrome only allowed you to select ONE link at a time, after opening the link within the history file. Firefox displayed the full URL of each link, lined up in a nice neat little row, so you could select all of them at once and move them where needed to batch open them all at once, one in each tab.However, for other things, Google Chrome beats out Firefox hands down. Like drop down tabbed browsing. Wastes less screen space too. When you have to jump around to different websites as many times as I do per day, you have to use Chromium or Google Chrome or get bogged way down. Especially if you have many different personae to work under.